Dynamic Course Coverage with Future Learn

FutureLearn is a UK-based online learning platform that partners with universities and organisations worldwide to deliver short courses and degrees to millions of learners through flexible, fully online education.

Campaign Automation

Retail Automation

Tech

Client

Future Learn

Date

June 19, 2023

All work

The Challenge

Over 1,000 courses

Future Learn pride themselves on offering courses across a wide-ranging selection of topics and different fields. As such, they have an inventory of courses totalling well over a thousand, with each one requiring support through paid search channels.

Managing Inventory

All of Future Learn’s courses are provided by a range of different education partners. This means that there isn’t a consistent calendar of course start dates, making it difficult to keep on top of enabling and pausing course campaigns in line with course start dates.

Course-Specific Terms

Due to the specialised nature of the majority of the courses, the most relevant search terms for them tended to be relatively niche and long tail. This, combined with the sheer volume of courses, made it difficult to build strongly targeted campaigns at scale.

The Approach

Our approach was to build a solution that would enable us to provide coverage across all courses, with specific search coverage that would automatically turn campaigns on and off based on start dates.

API Connection

Using our technology, we built a real time connection to the Future Learn CMS that would allow us to collect all course titles, course URLs and course start dates. This data was then collected into a Google Cloud instance on a daily basis and sorted into a readable table for later use.

DSA-based Structure

We then used the DSA campaign type to build course-specific campaigns around the course URLs. The DSA type triggered ads for searches that were related to the content of the page (i.e. course title, course provider), ensuring that we could cover specific searches per course.

Auto Status Change

We then built a second API connection from Google Cloud through to Google Ads. This would review the course start dates on a daily basis and automatically pause campaigns the day before that course was due to start. This prevented any wasted spend on closed courses.

Ready when you are

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The Results

+17%

Exceed targets

Providing coverage across all courses allowed us to maximise our demand capture, allowing us to achieve well over the target enrolments given to us by the business.

-30%

Reduced costs

The automated inventory management and DSA approach helped us to drive a cost per enrolment that was well under target and an improvement on previous performance.

-18%

Budget savings

We managed to exceed our targets and also come in under the budget that we had been set for our activity. We were able to reinvest this budget in test & learn activity.

Our Work

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